Tag: From the Corner of My Eye

From the Corner of My Eye, part 3

Note: This should have been posted days ago. Sorry about that, but here it is!

You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.

How does a reasonably intelligent, well-educated person, interested in and accepting of science, who views themselves as rational (whether it’s true or not) and mindful, come to an experience like this one, and what do I (being the person described above) take away from it? How do I process and interpret it?

Here’s another question: how can I write about this experience and not completely destroy my credibility? If I’m being honest, I have to start by admitting that for some people’s purposes, I can’t. A true skeptic is going to want far more than my say-so, and I don’t have more than that to offer. I have my eyewitness account, which is not objective proof of anything.

I’ve spoken to Matt about it since. He remembers that day but not clearly. He remembers that I told him I saw a pixie, and that I agree with his friend that there may be fairies in those woods, but not that a damselfly followed us. As time goes on, the incident lives only in my memory, though it remains vivid.

Now, I wouldn’t say I’m a skeptic, though I wouldn’t describe myself as credulous, either. I’m willing to examine or to re-examine any idea and I don’t believe most things in this world don’t have have clear-cut “yes” or “no” answers.

Are there fairies? Probably not.

Giovanni_map_mars

Is there other intelligent life in the universe? I’d say that there must be, almost certainly. In this century, we have discovered hundreds of exoplanets – planets beyond our solar system – in our nearby galactic neighborhood. We’ve even begun to find the little, Earth-like worlds that might bear life similar to our own, though we haven’t yet found that life.

Is Schrödinger’s cat alive or dead? Yes. My understanding of the uncertainty principle is not that the unseen cat in the box is both alive and dead, but that because we don’t know one way or the other, we have to include in predictions we make involving the cat in the box both possibilities, with the knowledge that the cat certainly is in a single state, alive or dead. Until we know one way or the other, both might be true.

Is Schrödinger’s cat undead? We have no prior example of this condition available, so the probability of a zombie cat inside Schrödinger’s box is pretty much nil.

But in my memory is a clear image of a five-inch-long, quite handsome, fierce little blue man with gossamer wings.

Maybe I’m a little bit like Percival Lowell the astronomer, in that I’m captivated by a romantic notion. Lowell took something he misunderstood and turned it into his life’s work, and swayed not only generations of young dreamers, but got the University of Arizona, among other bastions of respectability and learnedness, to support his search.

The Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, using a new, higher-powered telescope developed in the late nineteenth century, spent a great deal of time studying Mars at a closer level of detail than had previously been possible. He made a number of discoveries about the surface of the planet, including a seasonal change in the coloration of some regions of the surface, a darkening that seemed associated with the warmer temperatures of Martian summer. He discovered the immense Martian sandstorms that can cover the entire surface of the planet for weeks at a time. He also noticed some deeper channels cut into the surface of Mars that ran in straight lines for long distances. He called them “canali,” marking them on the beautiful hand-rendered maps he made of the Martian surface.

Lowell, an American planetary astronomer of some renown, saw Schiaparelli’s maps and became obsessed with the notion of the Canals of Mars, envisioning them as immense artificially-created waterways, marvelous feats of engineering created in an effort to conserve water by an ancient and advanced civilization, purposed towards saving a desertified, dying world.

Schiaparelli, learning of Lowell’s enthusiasm, wrote to him, explaining that “canali” was the Italian word for “channel,” referring to striations observed on the Martian surface without any inference of intelligent purpose intended or necessary, and furthermore that he had seen nothing to suggest that the canali were, in fact, evidence of intelligence, much less the advanced engineering marvels Lowell was busy convincing himself and others that they were.

No matter. Lowell continued to pursue his obsession, to the point of getting the Lowell Observatory at Kitt Peak in Arizona built with the intention of exploring the surface of Mars as closely as possible.

Over time, the dream of Martian canals has faded and died, though it burned brightly for a time in the popular imagination. From Lowell’s misinterpretation of Schiaparelli, we have been gifted with enduring adventure classics like H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars and ten more books featuring the former Civil War Captain John Carter, and the contemplative Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, the story of a human infant, sole survivor of a failed Martian expedition who is raised by ancient and mysterious Martians, who comes back to Earth to become a prophet for the modern age. The book was controversial and influential in its time, and would not have existed but for Percival Lowell’s misreading of Giovanni Schiaparelli’s work.

Lowell was wrong, we know that for certain. In fact, it was known at the time that Lowell’s ideas were probably fanciful. But it’s also true that his fancies have left a mark on reality. If I’m like him, it’s in my willingness to entertain an idea that holds little objective merit, for reasons of my own. I’m different from him in that I don’t have any particular ambition to convince people that my fanciful ideas are real.

I actually hope what I saw never proves to be real. How disappointing it would be to have the existence of pixies, unicorns, or other such creatures confirmed by science: perhaps more disappointing than if someone were able to prove the negative, that fairies are, indeed, mere products of fertile imaginations and romantic hearts like mine.

From the Corner of My Eye, part 2

You can read part 1 here and part 3 here.

My current favorite place to view the night sky is at the homes of my friends Matt and Jack, who live in the old, low mountains west of Hartford, Connecticut. They live on a three-and-a-half-acre lot, in a beautiful old Victorian farmhouse. Matt and I will often walk out into the back yard to where there’s a large open area about fifty yards from the house, to look up at the sky.

During the day, we’re likely to see bunnies, deer, wild turkeys, shrews, chipmunks, squirrels, crows, hawks, bobcats, foxes, and even the occasional black bear. They have a bird feeder set up on a pulley system to keep the squirrels away. It hangs just outside their kitchen window. It’s better than television. I’ve seen blue jays, woodpeckers, nut hatches, sparrows, finches, and orioles. Matt says he has identified over 80 different species of birds out his kitchen window.

They have three catalpa trees, horse chestnuts, a Kentucky coffee tree, fruit trees, a grape arbor, a mimosa tree that they had to cut down a year or two ago, but which seems to be coming back now. There’s mock orange, Joe Pye weed, hydrangeas and so many beautiful flowers. Out in the back half of the lot, where Matt and I go to stargaze, they let some sections grow wild, alternating with places they mow for the sake of wild plants.

They have a fragrant carpet of wild mountain thyme. There are ramps in early spring. Milkweed grows there, so they also have tons of butterflies. There is a vernal pool at the back of their lot. On a spring night, you can listen to peepers and bullfrogs mixing in with the chirping of crickets. I feel a sense of magic every time I visit. To stand in that yard is to steep in deep layers of time, to know a convergence of worlds.

Beyond their property line is a mountain — what a westerner like me would call a hill — tree-covered and stony, crisscrossed with old stone walls and other signs of old-time life. There’s a railhead that runs along the back of their property, the rails themselves long since pulled up, noticeable only as a topographical feature as you walk through the woods.

At the time the house was built, the surrounding area was farmland, but as agriculture in this country moved towards the greater expanses and more arable land in the west, the woods have slowly reclaimed much of the land that once grew corn, beans, grains, and tobacco, or pastured livestock. The low stone walls, the railhead among the wooded hills, and a few houses like that of our friends are the last remnant of that time.

The current woods that now cover the hills of Connecticut are a shadow of what was there before there were farms all over that part of the world. The Pequod and Wampanoag Indians, who held the land before the farmers, managed the land differently, but well. When the first Englishmen visited this area, they marveled at the abundance of wildlife here, never perceiving the methods the Indians used to foster that wildlife in its abundance, clear-cutting some of the undergrowth, leaving thickets in other places to make it more hospitable to the wildlife that is just coming back now.

In the forest across the road from the house, a little stream wanders through; trails thread back and forth between the neighboring houses, in and around the gently sloping terrain. One late spring day we walked a bit deeper into those woods than usual. Matt had been told the week before our visit that the neighbors would be away, and that we were welcome to come swim in their pond.

We crossed a fallen tree over the little brook that wound through the woods. I had seen fish before in little eddies and pools, the calm places in the stream, but today, we didn’t linger long enough to spot them. We had a destination: the swimming hole, one of two ponds on the neighbors’ property we were visiting.

As we came out of the forest into a beautiful yard with a sprawling hourse, two ponds and a horse corral, the sun dazzled us a bit. Walking past the smaller of the two ponds on the lot, I spotted a couple of dragonflies flitting around, and we stopped briefly to admire them. I also noticed a couple of blue damselflies hovering about over the open water. We watched them as they swooped and hovered.

While scanning the scene, I caught a glimpse of something odd about a damselfly out of the corner of my eye. It seemed to change shape as I looked beyond it. Using averted gaze, I saw something that I’ll admit I’d wished to see.

The damselflies were blue on top, black underneath, with a silvery stripe dividing the two regions of their bodies, and wings very much like a dragonfly’s. In my averted gaze, the colors did not change, and the wings also remained. But I saw a little man attached to those wings, in very clear detail. His skin was blue, except for a silver stripe running down his side. He had shoulder-length, wild blue hair and a blue beard. Both were streaked with black. He was shirtless, wearing rough cut black trousers, and carryied a lance made of a sliver of wood, held parallel to his body. His gaze was focused on the pond; he was hunting. From his stillness, I gathered he was hiding behind an illusion.

I turned to Matt and said, “Oooh!” but then stopped.

“What?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing,” I replied. I looked back at the little man and once again only saw a damselfly. I walked away towards the other pond.

Matt followed, asking again what I’d seen.

“You’ll think I’m nutty,” I said.

“No, really,” he insisted. “What did you see?”

We were a good distance away from the dragonfly pond now, but I still resisted talking about what I’d seen. But as we approached the wharf and deck at the near end of the swimming pond, I relented. “I thought I saw a pixie,” I admitted, and described him.

Matt thought about it for a second, then said, “I have another friend who thinks there are fairies around here, too. He insists he’s seen them.”

“Have you ever seen them?” I asked.

“No.”

He shucked off his clothes down to his swimming trunks, and dove into the pond.

I didn’t swim that day: I love to, but I hadn’t brought anything to swim in, so I sat on the edge of the wharf and stuck my feet in the water, calmly kicking back and forth. He told about his and Jack’s friends who owned the place, how they were prominent environmentalists, and that the first time he had met one of them, the woman had ridden up their driveway on the roan mare in the corral.
I gushed a bit about how beautiful the place was. Eventually, Matt climbed out of the water, sat in the sun for a bit, then dried off and put his pants, shirt, and boots back on. We started walking home, past the corral and the dragonfly pond.

As we passed the pond, a damselfly came towards us, and flew low above our heads for a good twenty yards as we walked halfway to the line of the woods. Then it turned back. Neither of us mentioned it or looked at the fly, which had been hovering about a foot above my head. We continued on through the beautiful woods, over the brook, across the road, and back to the house.

–to be concluded

southern_damselfly_coenagrion_mercuriale